Representative image of the 2018 Woolsey Fire approaching Malibu, illustrating the wildfire conditions faced by staff and animals at a Malibu animal park | Wikimedia Commons
The park’s owners later said that about 135 of roughly 140 animals survived, including Stanley and around 80 horses. The Woolsey Fire began on November 8, 2018, and moved quickly through Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Semler told Reuters that moving an 18-foot giraffe into a 12-foot trailer would carry obvious risks.
Because their keepers considered moving them more dangerous than sheltering them in place, thirty-two employees stayed behind at Malibu Wine Safari as the Woolsey Fire swept toward the property in November 2018, while large animals, including Stanley the giraffe, remained on site. Because the giraffe was already well known to visitors and had a large social-media following, but the fire involved an entire collection of animals, not just one celebrity giraffe, stanley’s survival became the most visible part of the story.
Dakota Semler, whose family owned the park, told Reuters that employees remained with the animals throughout the fire, and said that transporting some of the exotic animals presented its own risks. The park said its management and animal-care staff had prepared for evacuation but ultimately kept the animals on site. The property is at Saddlerock Ranch, in the mountains above Malibu, and was badly damaged as the fire moved through the area. Stanley had become the most recognizable animal there, and photographs of the giraffe standing near the flames spread rapidly online. The images prompted public concern that the animals had been abandoned after staff evacuated. A giraffe, for example, could not simply be loaded into an ordinary trailer, and moving frightened exotic animals during a fast-moving wildfire could cause injury or shock. Local reporting after the fire found that Stanley had survived, with ABC7 Los Angeles reporting that the animals had been placed in a pasture with little fuel to burn as the fire approached. Wildfire evacuation plans are often designed around getting people out quickly, but exotic animal collections create another problem: many species cannot be transported easily under emergency conditions. Other large animals can become difficult to control when frightened, and the logistics of finding suitable vehicles and destinations become more complicated as a fire advances. Stanley was photographed alive and walking around the damaged ranch after the flames passed. The park’s surviving animals still needed care, while crews began dealing with destroyed buildings, burned enclosures and other damage left behind by the Woolsey Fire.
